


Incarnation

by Nemonus



Category: Control (Video Game)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-28 13:03:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20967002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemonus/pseuds/Nemonus
Summary: Sometimes, the Oldest House punished unorthodox experimentation.Sometimes, it rewarded it.





	Incarnation

It was not strictly forbidden for Emily Pope to explore Executive Affairs, but neither was it strictly allowed.

The lockdown protocols were perfectly reasonable. People had died in the Hiss invasion: Emily could not expect the ones who remained to go back to their desks. But nor could she expect a lead researcher to work without any field testing. A trickle of fear ran down her spine when she passed the last guard between her and the wilderness rooms. The Oldest House itself loomed, high ceilings crowded with shadows. 

“Be careful out there." The guard resettled her grip around her rifle. “You know, I wouldn’t recommend anyone except the director wander around. We can’t go get you. Not right away.”

Because protocol said a guard would need to report back to base first, so as not to leave their post open. Emily Pope had read what she could get of the Rangers’ manuals as well as the Research materials she needed for her day-to-day. They had been fascinating.

“I understand.” She nodded at the woman, hoping her own fear didn’t show in her voice. “I’m not going far.”

“Suit yourself.” 

_Jesse needs me. _That was the one thing which most motivated Emily to indeed not wander too far. The Hiss in these rooms would put a bullet through a warm body with only an inter-dimensional burst of color as warning. And if Emily died, no one would be able to give Director Faden information like she did.

So, she walked watchful and alone through Central Executive. The Hiss muttered above her as she looked up through an open doorway. In Executive Affairs, red light filled what had once been the administrative pool. The echo was intrinsic in the Hiss chant, but Emily had also been working in the bureau long enough to know _everything _echoed slightly in parts of the Oldest House. Emily’s shoes shuffled on the carpet as she crossed the threshold into the room.

Here, a man in starched pants curled backward into the air. There, a woman in a black skirt bent over as if she had dropped something. The noise set Emily’s heart hammering, but once she had been inside for a few seconds her researcher’s mind started to try to find patterns. Did the cadence match some other rhythm of the House? Were the arcs of their bodies mathematical clues to their fate?

A man’s foot dangled near her, just out of reach. She stretched up toward it, but could not touch even her nails to the bottom of his dusty shoe. _Are you still in there? _She wanted to say.

Jesse had not been able to clear the corruption from people like this man, who had been taken.

Emily worked there for the next half an hour, while the yellow light of the House shone on unchanged. She took notes. She measured the angle of the man’s spine, calculating from the ground. She held tympanic sheets up to be influenced by the resonance. When she had completed this work, she made notes about what reports she would need to write up next. It was rote work; she knew which piece of information belonged in each field of a report and ordered them accordingly even as she collected the data in the order in which she found it.

Finished, she circled back toward the conference room. Passing the director’s office sent a shiver of tension down her spine. Most of her work days had been spent in Research, but over the course of the invasion she had become used to the glossy floors and carpeted hallways of Central. Maybe one day, she would spend more time here. She wanted to work at the top of the chain, instead of stuck several rungs down.

She circled Central Executive, finding herself near the guards in front of Dylan Faden’s makeshift cell. The pyramid-shaped extrusion of House—widely considered to be a representation of the Board, but not conclusively linked to its actions—seemed to watch her. The door guards did watch her pause by the railing. It was well within protocol for armed Rangers to watch a dangerous specimen like P6, but having them guard a _person _was strange even for the House.

Or at least, Emily had _thought _it was. But according to Jesse, Dylan had been in Containment for a decade without most of the bureau’s agents knowing about it. Fury rose in her. _Darling. _This had been his fault. Darling wanted to play with Research like his own personal puppet, and never trusted anyone else to hold the strings. Emily had often thought that if someone else had been in charge, she would have advanced further. She always worked hard—wanted nothing more to work hard—and meanwhile, Darling had … been doing his own experiments.

She caught the eye of one of the guards, who returned a placid stare.

“I want to see him,” Emily said.

For a moment she thought her request had sounded awkward or childish. That wouldn’t stop her from going inside—there was certainly no protocol against eccentricity in the House—but it would weaken the guards’ faith in Jesse’s chosen team. Emily intended to work as hard for Jesse as she had for Darling—and, ideally, progress further under the new leadership.

The guard simply nodded.

Perhaps, Emily realized a moment later, they had been lenient because Jesse was already inside. Emily’s footfalls sounded loud in the makeshift containment room. The buzz of the Hiss incantation had wormed its way into her ears in the administrative office, enough so that it took her a moment to realize that it was Dylan, and Dylan alone, who spoke in those many voices here.

Emily folded her arms in front of Dylan’s cell and squeezed until the edges of the HRA pinched. The armed guards rustled behind her.

"Darling kept you from me," Emily said.

Maybe talking about Jesse's brother in the second person was weird, Emily wondered. Maybe Emily had been in the Bureau too long and—

But no. She wouldn’t rather be anywhere else. Imagine this going on and _not knowing about it! _To be someone walking through the city in a raincoat, not even seeing the building…

She would risk anything to be here.

Beside her, Jesse Faden looked at her brother with the poised brittleness Emily had seen when she first talked about Polaris. Emily could see Dylan’s throat work as he muttered the Hiss incantation. It was horrible, of course, but wasn’t there also some beauty in the rainbow-slick fog and the blank-eyed stare? The faces of the Hiss-corrupted agents were as blank as masks, their skin unnaturally oily and yet somehow also unnaturally matte. Dylan exhibited none of that. Dylan was an experiment dressed in sackcloth, the jumpsuit limp like loose skin. 

“What _is _he?” Emily almost instantly regretted asking the question. Dylan was a _person_, not a subject. The two definitions did often get confused in the Oldest House, but usually in the other direction.

“He can hear us.” Jesse gestured with an open palm.

Emily suppressed a startle. “You know, I’m not used to them listening. The Hiss.”

“If he is one, he’s human too. He _wants _to be this.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. But I have an idea. Are you sure you want to know?”

Emily looked at Jesse. “Yes. Did he tell you?”

“Not exactly. But, Emily, they kept him in a _cage_. If they had done that to me, I might grab on to any power I could get in order to escape, too.”

“There was so much Darling didn’t know,” Emily said. “He wanted to keep it all hidden, but that meant no one could help him. As if this—“ She gestured at the cell. “Is worse than anything else in that panopticon.”

“You shouldn’t stay in here alone too long,” Jesse said. “I’ve been talking to him, and I’m still not sure whether he’s my brother or the Hiss. Sometimes he talks like one and then the other.”

“Really? Fascinating. I’d like to set up some recording equipment to hear that, if you don’t mind. It’s standard procedure for an altered object, but you can make the standards here. Or at least, some of them.”

Jesse gave a terse nod. “Okay. But nothing invasive. Don’t scare him. Just use the same equipment as you do around the control points.”

“Audio, video, and resonance. We don’t actually use those around the House most of the time. Nothing ever changes around the control points. Not until you got here.”

“Maybe that’s something we should change,” Jesse said. “This place feels like it’s watching me. I want to watch back.”

Maybe, if Emily made herself useful enough to Jesse, she could take over where Darling had left off. She just needed to sound reliable. 

“At least the House hasn’t undergone a major shift lately," Emily said. "The last thing we need right now is not to be able to find the emergency rations.”

Jesse was focused on Emily now, not on Dylan and the Hiss incantation he continued to mutter into the air. “You all must have tried, right? To monitor the House shifts?”

“Somehow, the cameras always get crushed, no matter how many we try to use. The House is our strangest specimen of all.” Emily smiled. That was one of the exciting parts of working here; living in a place that was, in its own way, a kind of threshold. Every work day was an exploration, even if she only walked to her desk and back and studied nothing else.

“I’m not entirely sure I’m used to this place’s weirdness yet.” Jesse's mouth quirked in the tight grimace Emily was beginning to recognize as a cousin to fury. “Just be careful, Emily.”

“I will.”

“Weren’t you just outside Executive?”

“Just in the administrative office.”

Jesse sighed. “Okay. I’m headed back downstairs. Please keep working on your reports, and let me know as soon as possible if anything changes with him.”

“I will.” Emily gave her a sloppy salute.

The two held one another’s gazes for a long time before Jesse turned away. She left the room, her firm footfalls echoing loudly.

When Emily looked back at Dylan, she could not make the separation Jesse had. He was a person, but he was _also _something which had been altered. The arc of Dylan’s spine matched the curve of the Hiss-corrupted workers, a mathematically perfect discomfort. Blue veins showed under the translucent skin of his hands. All this time, he had been in the bureau and Emily had not known. Had he grown up here? Were they the same age, Dylan roaming the halls of Research while she was in grade school?

She had always liked stories of strange things. She had, she was only slightly ashamed to admit, often _liked _stories of strange things—the vitality of a vampire’s bite, the mystery of a mask. If she kissed the walls of the Oldest House, would something touch her back?

And here was Dylan Faden, shaven as anonymous as a statue, with the Hiss words flowing from his lips. The pale hands drifted.

_Don’t talk at him. Talk to him._

“Dylan?”

Slowly, he straightened out of the backward curve. His face was so similar to Jesse’s: a scornful twist to the lips, high cheekbones, something shining like the edge of a knife in his eyes. “Hello, Research,” said Dylan. “I already told Dylan’s sister. I’m P6.”

Emily was, for just a moment, frightened that Jesse was not there with her. Protocol dictated that Rangers be in hailing distance when working with the most classified projects. Right now, she was firmly within the bounds of that rule; the guards could surely see her. Knowing that made her feel safer. “How does it feel, to be like this?”

Dylan’s gaze darted around the cage. “Good,” he crooned. “The Hiss made the House into its new body.”

“Do you feel the resonance around us now? What spectra do you operate on?” Emily dug in her bag for her tympanic paper.

“Such detailed questions. The Hiss _acts_. It _feels_. Don’t you want to stop asking questions?”

_Sometimes. _

_Never._

“_An earworm is a tune you can't stop humming in a dream_,” Dylan said.

The incantation distracted Emily from trying to find her equipment. “If I ask questions, I can find out what the Oldest House is. Doesn’t being here make us all want to know that? Where it comes from? Where are its edges?”

“They’re good questions, but sometimes the best answer comes from becoming the specimen.”

He was undeniably wrong about that. Emily remembered the warnings about the Mold: if growth is advanced enough for you to see the body structures, the Mold will make you want to eat it.

Dylan’s voice took on the layered buzz of the incantation. “_Baby, baby, baby, yeah. Just plastic. So safe and nothing to worry about._” With control and precision, he pressed his palm against the glass. The glass did not melt away. Whatever talk of thresholds, Dylan did not breach the cell around him.

“Darling kept you from learning everything,” Dylan said.

“Yes, he did.” Emily tried to keep her expression passive.

“He knew P6, but he didn’t always talk to him. He talked to Jesse’s brother.”

“Tell me more about that.” _Keep him talking. Tap your feet to the rhythm and see what steps it matches._

“Let me have your hand.” Dylan tapped his fingers against the glass.

What would be the harm?

What would be the reward?

Emily pressed her hand against the glass. Her hand fit within the silhouette of Dylan’s, though not smaller by much. Two of her fingers resisted touching the glass because they stayed bent at the joints, broken before she worked for the bureau. The lines on Dylan’s face smoothed, his expression losing some of the scorn. It was so easy to imagine him closer. She would kiss his cheek at first. Would his hands be weightlessly light or too heavy?

_Unrecorded archetypes! _Emily snatched her hand back. She should have thought of how archetypical gesture could apply to the subject. Dylan laughed softly, but it was a human sound, not the layering hiss. She shook her hand and hissed herself, through gritted teeth as if she had been burned.

Just as she turned to go back to the conference room, Dylan began to chant again. The incantation rose and crested like a wave of oil-slick color. Emily’s fluttering hands found her notes in her bag. She would have _so much _to think about.

She would have to write that laugh down.

But she was also left with the lingering feeling that she had made a mistake, or missed something. She should not have let Dylan pull her so close. Jesse had told her to be careful. Jesse had entrusted her with responsibility. She squared her shoulders, determined to hold that responsibility stable.

* * *

Emily Pope stood in front of a corkboard, her hands shaking. The world was sepia, filled with the clacking of typewriters and the whipping sound of mail hurtling through the pneumatic tubes. She had to perform _every task, right now_, or else there would be _consequences_. She had joined the Federal Bureau of Control just two days ago, and she was a young clerk and uncertain and there were _so many ways _to get every task wrong and only one way to do them right.

Emily delivered mail to each desk. Identical letters slipped down onto identical corners.

Something was wrong.

Emily picked up coffee cups, could not remember delivering them to a kitchen. People floated in the air or curled in on themselves on the floor, dryly retching.

Something was wrong.

Emily delivered a message to the director. She knew she should be terrified of this prospect for some reason. Many times she had seen people come out of the director’s office and had not wanted to look at them. Rumors in the office said some people disappeared in there. But her mind was so fuzzy, her thoughts so unreliable. She could not trust the world not to slip out from under her senses. This created in her a kind of confused bravery. She opened the door and walked into the office. 

With great difficulty she lifted her gaze to the man behind the desk.

Trench looked up. His eyes were hidden behind silver lenses. Stubble crawled up his cheeks. Emily froze, her palms suddenly slick with sweat. _There _was the memory she had been trying to grasp.

The director turned people into monsters.

“Remember?” Trench said.

Emily’s memory swam. In the way of dreams, there was no transition from one scene to another.

It was just that now Dylan Faden sat behind the desk with a gun in his hand. The edges of the weapon twitched, discrete cubes breaking off and reforming into a whole. Nothing else in the room seemed to have changed. The pillow and blanket Trench had placed on the couch were still there, evidence of long nights in the office. Dylan’s face, younger and clean-shaven, held a very different, clinical coldness from Trench’s frayed fatigue.

“Your mail, sir,” said Emily.

Something was wrong. Dylan should not have been the director. He should not have been here. Emily put her hands on her head, threading her fingers through her hair. The carpet was not illuminating. She shook her head. “What’s happening?”

Dylan should have been chanting Hiss incantations in a cell in Containment. To see him sitting here, the power of the House under his feet, was so different from his captivity that it shocked through her. She should have been the senior-most identifiable member of the Research Department, working on codifying Jesse Faden’s discoveries and coordinating the surviving researchers. Instead, she was here…

She looked back up. He sat straight-backed, his eyes bright, the strange gun in his hands. Hadn’t she wanted to see him like this? Hadn’t she wondered what he would be like with his faculties? A suit and tie would fit him better than the baggy, gray shirt. Or was it the Hiss itself that attracted her, the nameless submission to forces that could not be understood?

“Puppets,” said Dylan. “A little on the nose, don’t you think? No one should ever have been tying strings.”

In the way of dreams, there was no transition between the moment before action and the moment after. Continuity shifted. First Dylan was holding a gun and then he was holding a foot-long coil of white twine.

Emily held out her hands.

Dylan reached over the desk and tied a loop of twine around her index finger.

“Do you know what Research did to me?”

“No. I don’t. I would have wanted to know. Darling didn’t even tell me you existed.”

“They kept me in a cell. I haven’t been in the world for so long.”

“It’s not worth missing. Everything important happens _here_, in the House.” She balled her hand into a fist, started to pull her hand toward her chest before considering Dylan’s fingers around hers. The twine constricted, pressing a red circle into her skin.

“It’s so easy to say that when you’re free. The Hiss are here right now, you know.” He looped the twine around her palm, over her wrist. Her hand tingled. “We can’t hear their song because we’re in the song. But it’s here. Things are there even when you don’t see them. I was there all along, and you did nothing.”

This, Emily knew, was where the script demanded she say _I didn’t know. _Say something to convince him she would have helped him if she could. Apologize to him. Maybe, afterward, he would apologize back to her for the destruction he had overseen. But there were so many questions, and she had to know the answers.

“You didn’t take to your powers as much as Jesse did, but you had telekinesis too. Why was that?" Emily asked. "Was the Hiss inside you all along?”

Dylan shook his head, clucked his tongue against his teeth. “Trench was the first infected by the Hiss. Him. Not me.”

_Trench! _So, this went even further up the chain of command than Emily had imagined. At least, with Jesse working with the Board’s blessing, there was no question she had embraced the directorship. Still, whether or not Dylan had started the invasion did not matter. He had become its figurehead.

“But I should have been the director,” he said. He leaned closer to her. Breath plashed against her nose and mouth, smelling like mouthwash. “I could have been, one day.” Unspoken: _the director tells Research what to do._

In delusion, everything was possible. “You already are,” said Emily. “And I’ll be your department head. I’ll tell them the truth.”

“And what is your truth, exactly?” He gestured with the hand that held the end of the twine.

She leaned over the desk and took his hand. Placed the end of the twine around his fingers as he had done to her, on the index finger and the wrist. He kept looking at her as she did it, his expression softening, becoming more vague. A dream, she thought. I can do anything in a dream. She pulled him to his feet. His free hand trailed along the top of the desk, one nail tapping the finish before he reached for the harness she wore.

Before he could touch it, she pushed onto her toes and kissed him. The Hiss’ babbling song filled her ears like the shouts of a crowd. His free hand found hers and pressed it down against the desk, her once-broken fingers never quite touching the surface. The kiss was hesitant at first. He pulled the twine taut, and she took a breath and leaned against him to create slack. Feeling the desk pressing against her thighs and her forehead against his was a siren call for her to kiss him again, and the second time he was more direct, more certain. When she broke the kiss he tilted his head with such poise that she felt surely anyone in the House would feel the force of it. This _was _their director. This _was _how things should be, and the Hiss should _eat _the Board.

Everything was all right.

But everything being all right felt _wrong._

Now it all made sense.

She hooked the twine around the top of Dylan's ear and placed her hand along the line of his jaw. She was breathing heavily, but she often was when she made a discovery like this, came to an understanding like this. “This is a broken threshold, isn’t it? The Hiss are bleeding in. They are turning themselves into a place. An essence of locality. We will be able to walk in the sounds of the incantation.”

Dylan shrugged. She felt his jaw move. “Maybe. That’s your job to know, Research. My job is just to let them have me.”

_Archetypes. Implications. Meanings. _“I’m right. I do know. And I know it’s Jesse’s job to be an expert at handling thresholds.”

Emily lifted herself onto the desk. A lamp tipped onto its side and scraped on the desk. Dylan rose to meet her. This time the kiss had teeth in it, a sudden slice of pain along her lower lip. His arms pressed around her waist. Dimly, she heard the outbox clatter onto the floor and felt the edge of the desk dig into her legs. Her heartbeat was deafening in her ears, the fuzziness in her mind transformed into a pleasant fog as she pressed her hands against Dylan’s face and deepened the kiss. Archetypes, symbols, mutual infection, mutual experimentation. Turn the nightmare into her own dream.

She pushed Dylan back into the director’s chair and followed him. She had her answer: his hands were heavy, pressing under the straps of the amplifier. On the next kiss she pressed her tongue into his mouth and tasted something rotten, sour, putrid and becoming less so by the second. He squirmed underneath her and pulled away, breathing shallowly.

“Jesse is stopping Dylan’s song now,” said P6 or the Hiss.

“Which part are you?” Emily’s voice was even. She held his stare.

He closed his eyes, gave a soft and resigned sigh. “I don’t know.”

“I think I do.” Emily leaned down and whispered in his ear. “We’ve treated each other so badly, you and I. But Dylan has a chance.”

The world dissolved.

Emily woke up with her head in her hands on the conference table. Sweat prickled on her hands and her back. _That was not Dylan. That was not Jesse’s brother. _

She gasped down at the table. _That was the thing that ate him. _Emily ached. The imprint of its mouth on her lips was faintly numb, and when she licked her lips, she tasted only salt.

_I helped you_, Emily imagined saying to Jesse, _by outsmarting something wearing your brother’s skin._

She could hear other people groaning in the atrium, other agents waking up out of confusing dreams.

The House itself felt lighter, not as stifling. Jesse had won, and Emily had broken every rule of containment she could think of, but she did not expect to be reprimanded. Even the director never knew everything that happened in the House.

Maybe, when this all shook out and Jesse returned, Emily would never see Dylan again. Maybe she hadn’t even seen him yet, with all of the changes that had happened to him. She had spoken to the Hiss itself, of that she was sure. When Dylan woke up from whatever shock had hit him—and there would be a fallow period, after a traumatic environmental change like the one she and Jesse had created—she would need to parse out which of him was which.

Emily Pope gave a tight, satisfied smile. Sometimes, the Oldest House punished unorthodox experimentation.

Sometimes, it rewarded it.


End file.
